DatalossDB Winners Announced!

The Open Security Foundation's DatalossDB contest winners were announced this morning and I took 2nd place. They have a good write-up of the entries (of which, some were pretty humorous) and contain all the nitty-gritty details of the contest and their entries. If you are interested, go take a look. I was very impressed with how close the results were considering there was only one year separating myself from the 3rd place winner. But in the end, a little luck never hurts...

I will never buy Seagate again!

Posting has been non-existent lately due to the fact that I was hit with a major failure in a drive that was meant to be my new primary data archive. I lost 10+ years of work stuff, vacation pictures, security research, collections, etc... With Seagate's now infamous failure in it's 7200.11 series and my personal problems with this 7200.12 series drive, I'm convinced the company is facing some serious quality-control issues.

My apologies for the lack of updates and should be back to regular posting by next week...

US Marshalls hit by Virus

Computerworld is reporting that the US Marshalls Service was hit by a computer virus early Thursday morning (5/21). According to sketchy reports the virus was a new variant of the Neeris virus, which has recently started mimicking the widespread and highly-successful Conficker virus.

If this is correct, the primary infection vector was most likely through the worm's new adaptation to infection by MS08-067. [exploit code here] Although it was possible it infected by hand (usb key, email, or other) it most likely was spreading via the internal network in this manner and that is why they disconnected from the DOJ network.

More details to follow if I can find source code or .ASM for Neeris...

Before there was SMS...

SMS is pretty popular nowadays. Before the widespread addiction to cellular phones though, there were pagers. A similar principle in theory, the pager network has a slightly more "open" design making it much more easy to intercept text meant for another device.

LadyAda of Adafruit industries brings back the mid-90's in this awesome video showing how to easily reverse-engineer an old Motorola FLEX pager for monitoring pager-network data streams.

Part 1:


Part 2:


Note: Flex and POCSAG have been around forever almost and there have been thousands upon thousands of diagrams, schematics and 'zines detailing how to listen in. For those screaming about wiretapping laws, you are over a decade late to the party.

Brazilian Satellite Hackers: Update

Not content enough to merely read the story about our pirate friends down south in Brazil, I hit Google in search of more specifications on exactly what equipment was being utilized and what frequencies they were transmitting on to see if I could tune in on any of the chatter.

[FleetSatCom Frequencies]

Judging from other information I've found it seems like 255.550mhz is a popular frequency.